All the Voices Cry (5 page)

They were quite the pair, those artists. They used to drive across from Toronto for the summer, arriving in Quebec with all the excitement and release of being in a different country. He built sculptures throughout the woods at all hours of day and night, and she was a photographer, drooping about with her hair in her eyes. He was stocky and she was willowy. Otto called them the Rock and the Reed. We used to take visitors to the outskirts of the artists' terrain to see the Rock's work. It was worth the walk to see the faces carved into the clay banks of the stream, or the huge mobiles made of leaves and horsehair. Some visitors murmured about scribbles on water when they saw the sculptor's work, others said he must be a maniac. Once, when Otto and I took my father on this walk, the Rock saw us photographing a pile of leaves arranged in a spiral. He rushed towards us, shouting, not unlike a short polar bear with his shaggy chest and bristling white head.

“The Rock is drunk,” Otto said, turning away. My father, on the other hand, tapped his pipe out on a tree and refilled it, saying,
“Speak of trolls and they rustle in the hallway.”

Sheltered by the low eaves, there is less snow up here on the boardwalk that joins the assorted cabins and studios together. There's a banging sound coming from the summer kitchen. Perhaps it's squatters. The artists won't mind squatters. They share everything. I can see from here that the storm door has been wedged open by a drift. I might be offered a hot drink.
We might have a talk about my Baba Yaga problems. Squatters know a lot about society, being in it and out of it at the same time. This is snooping, Freya, it will gain you nothing, peering in at the empty easel, the jar of cobwebbed brushes:
At every doorway, ere one enters, one should spy round.

I'll just trot along and have a look.

Many summers ago a new dog took off on us, spooked by the unfamiliar give and snap of the forest floor. Otto and I wandered the woods all afternoon whistling and calling. Eventually we arrived here at the colony. We heard raised voices inside the summer kitchen, and the heavy groan of female exasperation. And then the avocado shot out the door, powering into the sunlit grove.

How richly endowed with feeling, how proper it seemed to me at that moment, to hurl avocados in times of passion and of rage. The sunlight descended through the canopy of trees in blue yellow shafts, illuminating the bright thistledown of the Rock's hair where he stood blocking the doorway. She meant to get him, the throw was hard, but passion warped the trajectory. Sailing past the sculptor's ear out the screen door the green missile landed on the rock in front of us, its froggy innards slipping out from beneath the tough skin pushed awry.

At that time there was no electricity and no road access to the cabins on the lake. Otto and I were still bringing our food across by canoe. The waste of the avocado suddenly appalled us both. We crept away in silence.

Today I would not say no to rage, or to any other kind of feeling.

What is this banging in the kitchen? A can has just thudded out through the screen door, tumbling low and making heavy progress. Looks like some one has been trying to open it with a screwdriver. Tossed aside, smeared with ketchup and flour, the side dented, the label slashed with what look like—claws. Ye gods and mortals.
Speak of trolls and they rustle in the hallway.

Any minute now that bear will sense me with his flour-frosted snout, hunger and frustration all he knows. Now I cannot hear anything except for our breathing, the bear's and mine. Baba Yaga and Red Suspenders and passion be damned. A bear is not a sustaining illusion. A bear is.

Oh my. Where have I got to in all this?

Shuffle back shuffle back, clatter off the walkway while the crows lift off the treetops and all the voices cry,
Freya, Freya, we walk in the woods alone my dear, walk in the woods alone.

P
OOR MAURICE. He failed, but until I walked in the door at the cabin neither of us knew that it was a test, to catch a fish. How much easier for both of us if I had presented him with a room of straw to spin into gold, or had asked him to grow a peony, with a sunrise in its midst and the clouds of morning gathered in its petals.

Here is how it happened. I had been walking into the deepening dusk for an hour, just a grey-haired woman with a backpack and a stick. Not that a stick is much use against the ranging horsefly. Still, I don't mind flies. They are alive, and so am I. We are two species sharing the same pink evening air, the short green fields and the rectangular lumps of vanilla fudge that resolve into cows when I put my glasses on. I told Maurice not to come and get me. For the first time, he had his own guests at my cabin that night – Stewart Blaney, the antique dealer and his new wife Noreen. I was happy that he was making himself at home.

Here's how Maurice's voice sounds, booming out into the twilight, causing the birds to twitter with anxiety and the fish to stir in the waters.

My granddaughter Tessie is six weeks old and already sorting out the difference between day and night, clever little thing. Her fists curl up like fiddleheads. Mia is marvellous, rushing about with diapers and laundry, laying Tessie down like a fish in the scale, crowing over her daily weight gains.

I think I'll pick a few wildflowers for the table. They won't be up to Maurice's standard—hawkweed and viper's bugloss are hardly offerings to bring a peony grower. Maurice with his strains and names. To tell the truth, peonies have never appealed to me. Showy at first, they soon become so shaggy and overblown. I prefer my weeds with their shy flowers and tenacious root systems.

Maurice is intuitive about cultural things, and he's a talker, which is marvellous after Otto's silence, which became heavier as he got older. Wine, flowers, the best recording of a Strauss opera; Maurice always knows. I'll be on the point of feeling under-informed when he'll say something about the dense blue of the woods across the lake, or snort at the explosion of a four-wheeler on the road, and I know that he understands. We come at the same thing but from different angles.

Maurice has walked this country road to the post office and back several times since I have been away. I can see him thwacking at the heads of yarrow with his stick, whistling to the blackbirds, imitating, fitting in, as he does. I wonder if he burps back at the frogs. There is an old-fashioned courtliness
about Maurice's onion-skin writing paper that lures me back to him, like breadcrumbs tossed out for birds.

 

 

Grief dulls the edges of life. But love, like rain, washes the morning fresh and makes the next day possible. I have been so relieved to feel my spirit quickening at the thought of Maurice; to marvel again at the smooth decline on a man's thigh just below the hip bone, to discover tenderness stealing in even as I visit the supermarket and observe the pale white rootlets at the end of a bunch of chives. Otto was my husband, but Maurice is my lover. Maurice is teasing and skilled, which means that I stride towards him in the night and that I am surprised and greatly pleased by what we make possible together. The sweet stress of pleasure makes me feel green and hardy. I can smell the lilac on the evening air.

Otto and I put the dock in the water in 1973, the year that Mia was born. Each summer I sit down there in my Adirondack chair watching the fish hover over their nests in the beer-brown shallows. The parental gesture is protective, gentle and enduring. I have seen generations of fish come and go. Matriarch of fish: fish-mother, that's me. Last July I spent hours brooding over the fish fanning their tails above the silt and all the while I thought of baby Tess developing in the womb. How I wished her well in every sinew and soft bone.

Otto and I courted on the back of a motorbike in the streets of Prague, but I insisted that we make our home in Canada.
Qui prend mari prend pays,
they say in Quebec, but in our case it was
qui prend femme prend famille,
and I had a large one that I could not leave. We built the cabin together, replanting maples, tending to the moss, hiding the roof in a turf cloak spotted with hawkweed stars in the spring. When I saw the joy that Otto took in holding Mia when she was a baby, I thought that I had done the right thing, bringing him to Quebec, taking him out of his element.

I entered just as the meal was being served. The lamp on the table illuminated simple platters of baked potatoes, unctuous with melted cheese, fresh greens, a sprinkle of herbs. Upon a red enamel serving dish, the tiny bodies of the mother fish lay in a fragrant heap, dusted in flour and spices, cooked quickly in fresh butter and drizzled with a lemon and lime sauce. I kissed everyone on both cheeks, smiled, took my portion, and left it on the side of my plate. The meal progressed, the wine travelled round and round, and finally, finally, the Blaneys left.

“Great people, the Blaneys. What it is to have friends, eh Freya?”

“Maurice, those people are not my friends. You just ate my friends.”

We failed each other. I could not make Maurice see how the work of thirty years could be thus betrayed in a skillet, and as for Maurice, well, his response was to call me a dear, silly old thing, which only transformed me into a nasty beast with prickles.

After that things went as you might expect: a silent bed with two far-flung continents in it, the inevitable return to town, and my return to the cabin, alone. Maurice must have
crouched on the shore with his knife, scraping the fish as the dusk deepened around him. All summer long, translucent scales have worked their way out of the sandy beach, curved like a baby's fingernail, but fluted at the edge.

F
ROM BEHIND THE wheel of the inert Volvo, Associate Professor Colin Pilchard conceded that up in the woods, life, no longer simple, develops myriad complications. Accustomed to the striped shade of the university library, the academic body (pallid, unattached, in need of a haircut) becomes wreathed in rashes of unidentifiable origin. The academic mind, calibrated to accommodate issues and theories, finds itself at a loss to construe the rapid passage of the ground shrew, the wisp-thin lines of the spider's web or the irrational oscillations of the poplar leaf. The tenured heart, usually preserved in the dim formaldehyde of ethical behaviour, tends towards unconstrained lurches.